Progress towards an effective non-Markovian description of a system interacting with a bath

Abstract

We analyze a system coupled to a bath of independent harmonic oscillators. We transform the bath in chain structure by solving an inverse eigenvalue problem. We solve the equations of motion for the collective variables defined by this transformation, and we derive the exact dynamics for a harmonic oscillator in terms of the microscopic motion of the environmental modes. We compare this approach to the well-known generalized Langevin equation and we show that our dynamics satisfies this equation.